In an instant, the Hastings Mine, outside Trinidad, became a mass grave, leaving 121 men — most of them immigrants from Europe — entombed by an explosion and collapse triggered by a well-respected safety inspector.

Just outside the mine’s entrance, groups of children and weeping women crowded around and waited for news of the men. Those tasked with searching for survivors quickly came to the grim realization that there were none.

“I won’t say we found three men,” a rescuer told a reporter, according to historical records, “but we did (find) parts of them.”

It was April 27, 1917, just a few weeks after the U.S. joined World War I. The explosion was the blackest mark among a series of mining disasters that over decades had killed hundreds of men who were working risky jobs to provide for their families. And yet, it’s not been a major narrative in Colorado’s economic history.

Photo courtesy of History Colorado

A group of miners with rescue equipment pose near the mouth of a mine possibly in Las Animas County, Colorado. Many of the men hold face masks with tubes connected to respirator mechanisms strapped to their chests.

Photo courtesy of History Colorado

Aerial view of Hastings a Victor American Fuel Company coal camp in Las Animas County, Colorado. Shows tipple, washer, and screening plant. Company houses line the road that cuts through the canyon. Possibly a school or church is on a hill. Colorado and Southern Railway Company tracks extend from the mouth of the canyon to the industrial buildings. Ramshackle frame houses are clustered on one side of the tracks.

Photo courtesy of History Colorado

Three miners pose outside a mine at either the Berwind Mine in Las Animas County or the Rugby Mine in Huerfano County, Colorado. The men wear overalls and work boots. Electric mine lamps are attached to their caps and battery packs are at their waists. Each worker carries a enamelware lunch bucket (pail). Scrub and grass grows on the low slopes in the distance.

“This was the biggest mine disaster in Colorado history — and yet mines in the southern coalfields exploded so regularly as to numb the general public to the suffering mine workers experienced there,” said Thomas Andrews, a history professor at the University of Colorado and the author of “Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.”

More than 200 miners were killed at mines within a few miles of the Hastings in 1910 alone, Andrews said.

“All of these tragedies are commonly forgotten today,” he said, “even though the sacrifices of coal miners played such a crucial role in the modernization and industrialization of Colorado’s economy.

“The fact that most of those who died at Hastings were either immigrants or American citizens from marginalized groups certainly made it even more likely that Hastings would not be remembered by Colorado’s self-described ‘respectable’ citizens. And finally, the explosion’s timing — in the same month the U.S. declared war on the Central Powers — certainly meant that many contemporary Coloradans were distracted from the Hastings disaster.”

The Hastings Mine, owned by the Victor-American Fuel Company, was one of several coal mining operations in Huerfano and Las Animas counties that fostered the economies of Trinidad and Walsenburg. In 1916, the more than 13,000 coal miners in Colorado extracted more than 12.5 millions tons of coal.

“The coal industry was enormous in Colorado,” said Jason Hanson, director of interpretation and research at History Colorado. “It was also incredibly dangerous. Disasters happened in the early 20th century with heartbreaking frequency. And the damage fell disproportionately on the lower stratus — immigrants in Colorado who worked in the coal fields. It made a tough life even tougher.”

Of those killed in the explosion, 33 were Austrian, 25 Greek, 14 Italian, 13 Mexican, three Polish, two Welsh, one Spanish and one Serbian.

Las Animas County was the state’s leading coal producer, with nearly 4,500 miners alone, according to mining historian Eric Clements, who teaches at Southeast Missouri State University.

It was also the site of the Ludlow massacre in 1914, in which 11 children and two women died during a miners strike. It was part of the state’s so-called coal-field war, which cost dozens of lives as miners fought for better pay and safer working conditions.

Victor-American, one of the three-largest coal mining companies in Colorado, was among the principal players in the Ludlow strike, Clements said. “By the time of the explosion, they had given up that fight and entered an operating agreement with the miners union a month before.”

By 1917, regulations had also been passed in the state to try to make mines safer. There had been a series of explosions — including an earlier fatal accident at the Hastings Mine — dating back to the 1884, when the Jokerville Mine exploded in Crested Butte, killing more than 50 miners.

It wasn’t just explosions in the gaseous minefields of southern Colorado that miners had to worry about. Rockfall killed hundreds of workers each year, too.

Andrews said one of the big reasons why southern Colorado mine workers died so often in the late 1800s and early 1900s — and often so horribly — was because of the power that Victor-American and other coal companies wielded in local, state, and national life at that time. That made miners, like the ones who died in Hastings, unsung heroes of American progress.

“Eastern and Central Europe were supplying these people by and large,” said Clements, who has studied the Hastings explosion. “The mine management forces were Brits or Welsh or American.”

Rumors quickly began swirling about what caused the explosion, with early speculation centering on a nefarious plot. The Denver Post’s headline on April 28, 1917 read “PLOT POSSIBILITY SEEN BY STATE OFFICIALS.”

“There can be no explosion without gas or the actual setting off of something,” Colorado Attorney General Leslie Hubbard was quoted in The Post as saying. “This leaves the possibility of something of this kind (in) actual design in the explosion looms forth.”

At about 6:30 a.m. the day of the explosion, a fire boss had inspected the mine to make sure it was clear of any methane gas or other hazards.

“The fire boss who inspected the mine yesterday morning, coming out three hours before the explosion, said in a report on file in the office the mine was in excellent condition and that he would not be afraid to carry a lighted flame in it,” Hubbard said.

By about 9:30 a.m., the morning shift had gone into the mine’s workings to begin their day. Along with them was David Reese, a safety inspector for Victor-American who was well known in the mining community.

What happened next remains mostly unclear, but historians and newspaper articles from 100 years ago indicate Reese somehow inadvertently triggered the explosion probably by fiddling with his “safety lamp.”

“A safety lamp was found near the body of Reese,” the Denver Times reported. “The opinion prevailed among the jurors that something went wrong with the safety lamp … which he is supposed to have carried and that by taking it apart and attempting to repair or fix it the gases and coal dust ignited.”

In Reese’s pocket, investigators found 22 matches — a strict violation of the law and mining policy.

“None of them could believe it was this man who 100 percent should have known better,” Colorado History’s Hanson said.

Clements said Reese’s actions remain baffling even today. “What was going through his brain is kind of a great mystery. It’s a great question.”

“Hastings demonstrates the sacrifices that Colorado’s mine workers — immigrants and Americans of all sorts — made throughout the late 1800s and 1900s,” said Andrews, the CU professor. “Remembering Hastings should also inspire us to ensure that these sacrifices continue to translate into concrete actions — particularly the enforcement of health and safety regulations in the energy industries on which we all depend.”

Politics reporter. He has worked at The Denver Post since the summer of 2014, covering cops, courts, politics, environment, skiing and everything in between. He loves telling stories about Colorado's mountain towns and the Eastern Plains and wants to make sure our newspaper's great work extends into their communities.

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